Master's Guide¶

Mastering an adventure for your players (whether friends or acquaintances) is a satisfying, fulfilling experience. If you, like me, enjoy telling stories and enabling your players to have fun, then it is the role for you. YaVTT helps you by offering a vast choice of tools. They never get in the way, but allow a Game Master to enhance the game with things that would be harder to do at a physical table.

The tools¶

To discover the tools you have at your disposal, you must enter as the Master in an adventure. To do so, create the adventure as directed in the Adventure Hub guide. If you are the Master of an adventure, you can backup it by yourself by pressing Export on the Adventure card, or you can delete it.

Now, let's get into it: join the adventure as the Master! You will be met with quite a number of elements, more than what you are used to if you only played as a Player.

The chat screen¶

On the bottom left, you have the chat screen. Here you can communicate by text with the other members of the adventure. Simply click on the text box and write around.

The chat screen is also used to type handy commands.

1. Private messages: type /tell or /t, and select another player in the adventure. They will receive your message and it will be seen by just you two.
2. Rolls: by typing /roll you can roll dice in various formats. The YaVTT roll engine for now supports the following:
   • drop/-dr highest/lowest x: Drop the highest/lowest x number of dice. Example: /roll 4d20 drop highest 2.
   • advantage/-a: Roll two, take the highest. Example: /roll 1d20 -a.
   • disadvantage/-d: Roll two, take the lowest. Example: /roll 1d10 -d.
   • explode/-e: Reroll at will as long as a dice returns the highest value possible. Example: /roll 1d6 explode. (Don't try /roll 1d1 -e!)
   • reroll/-r x: Reroll a value or a list of values. Example: /roll 1d6 -r 1.

As the Master, you also have access to another command, if the system accounted for it: the Impose command.

By typing /impose you can trigger a system-defined challenge that can be broadcast to multiple players or to just one of them. Consult your played system in the rules.yaml at the following link to check what is supported. Your players will be shown a screen where they can roll for their character(s).

The roll screen¶

Directly above the chat you have the roll screen. The roll screen is the history of all rolls made in the adventure. The results of the /roll commands end up there. If your system has automations, the results of those automations end up there, together with buttons if planned. This is functionally equal to the Players' one.

The tool bar¶

On the top left corner you have your tools. You can keep them always visible if you check the "Pin tools" checkbox in Client Settings. Compared to Players, a Master has more tools at their disposal to craft great scenes.

• Select: this is your standard tool and the one you will use 99% of the time. Stay in Select mode to select and move tokens, and select tokens in bulk (as long as you are their owner) by dragging the mouse on the screen.
• Measure: use this tool to measure distance on the map.
• Drawing: use this tool to draw on the map. Drawings are visible by everyone. You can also choose to draw with temporary ink; it will disappear after 5 seconds.
• Paint: use this tool to hand-draw maps by painting squares/hexes. You have can paint square by square, fill a rectangle with the chosen colour, and erase. Use it when you want to extend a map if your players go for an unexpected detour, or to quickly draw a map of a random tavern your players took interests in; or simply play your whole adventure with a wet-erase style board.
• Build: use this tool when it comes to building! With the Build tool you can draw walls, doors, locked doors, invisible walls, and portals.
  1. Normal Wall: the standard wall you will use 99% of the time. It blocks vision and light, and it also stops movement. You, as the Master, can move tokens through walls if you drag them; players cannot. Walls block for you too if you move with arrow keys.
  2. Door: a door that can be opened or closed. When closed it acts as a normal wall; when opened, it acts as if it was not there.
  3. Locked Door: a locked door that only the Master can open. If the system allows it and authors for it, specific archetypes can be used as key. Double-clicking on a locked door as the Master lets you pick an library row: whoever has that library row in their inventory can open the door.
  4. Immaterial Wall: just like the normal wall, but it does not stop neither light nor vision.
  5. Portal: a Portal is a pre-made Trigger that moves tokens from one place to the other, either on the same scene or on another one. Use it when handling floors, or magic portals. It asks for consent to the player stepping over it before firing.
  6. Triggers: Triggers are special actions that are tied to a scene position. They can be extendable by the system and are mainly used to create portals or traps. They are quite complex to use, but basic usage is quite straightforward: set traps that spring on place or set fog resets or lights turning on and off in the same scene.
• Light: use this tool to place lights on the map. You can choose their colour, radius and animation. If you need to, you can set a dim light and bright light radius. In dim light, players have vision of tokens but they see them as a "?" icon. In bright light (the default), the tokens are fully visible. You can edit already placed lights by double-clicking on their opinters.

The scene selector¶

On the top centre, you can find the Scene selector. You, as the Master, can create scenes and set their visibility status. By right-clicking on a scene's name, you can edit its settings.You can also create a multi-floored scene by selecting the corresponding Base scene.

Settings are quite self-documenting, but some interesting buttons are:

• Clear board paint: clears all drawings made with the Paint tool.
• Clear fog memory: resets the fog memory for all players, meaning they will not see anymore the grayed-out map they have already explored. Good for tension!
• Arrow-keys only: allow players to only move tokens via arrow keys.

The side panel¶

Here, on the right, you can find the scaffolding that contains all your ready-to-use NPCs, characters, weapons, armour, items... and, as the master, you can also inspect all your players' characters, too. Drag and drop characters to the map to transform them into tokens, or try and drag items into a character's inventory by opening their sheet with a double-click.

The whole side panel can be way different depending on the system that is being played. The various panels you see are all system-declared and they represent the "building blocks" of the game: abilities, items, characters, cards, spells... However, if the system is well-made and you know its rules, you should have no problem navigating the panel.

Combat tracker¶

Very often, the default combat tracker will be the left-most panel. Here, you can usually find the combat logic, that is per-scene. The system author chooses what to include in the tracker. Usually, tokens can be in combat state or peaceful state. To switch to combat state, hover over your token. You will find a little dove icon beside it. Click it, and the icon ill switch to two crossed swords: that token is now considered in combat. Only the Master can start a combat, though.

System panels¶

To the right of the combat tracker you have the system panels. Each system declares so-called "Archetypes", such as Items, Characters, Abilities. They become panels in the side panel. Each of them has Kinds, that can serve as groupings in the respective panels.

The author can declare some Archetypes as less important; in that case, you can find them in the dropdown menu in the side panel.

Journals¶

This panel stores all your notes and journals. You can write them in markdown, share them with other players, or hide them.

Settings¶

Here you can find the Settings. As the master, you can also start a Clock. A Clock is a simple tracker that can go up and down and that you manually trigger. Use it to track time, events, or things such as YaRS Social Thermometer. You can choose to hide it from your players (surprise!) or show it (suspense!). Another thing you can do is open up the Adventure Settings, where you will find settings that are valid for the current adventure and that you can change at will.

The quickbar¶

On the bottom of your screen, you can see the Quickbar. I studied the quickbar as a helpful tool for both Masters and Players. Clearly, it is way more straightforward for players, who only have to move around one token per scene, but let's see what it does.

The quickbar is per-token and can be customised directly from the character sheet. Simply open a sheet, drag an ability to the quickbar to it, and it works! It is system-dependant, but for YaRS, it is as easy as that. Then take that sheet and tokenise it by dragging it to the map. You will see the token shares the same quickbar.

Having a quickbar handy greatly increases the speed of play, especially for NPCs, since it saves you from opening each sheet and clicking the ability. Left-clicking the ability uses it; right-clicking the ability shows you various additional actions (system-dependant).

You may ask yourself: if it is only used for tokens, why is it always there? In the future, I'd like to create a macro system that allows declaring some simple actions to be executed in order (a classic example: starting a combat and flipping all the tokens' combat states); for now, though, it does nothing. Sorry!